Faith Freedom International

This section of the forum is NOT for discussions. It is a database of documents, websites, books and other resources, to provide skeptics with the materials to compose their articles refuting Islam. Please place your links in the appropriate thread. If your material needs a new thread, please advise me first. We do not want to clutter this DB with too many threads that may be similar. Do not copy and paste. Give full references and make sure the source is reliable. If you want to rebut any of the documents posted here, use another thread in other sections of the forum.

We write to express our shock upon learning that members of the terrorist organization Hamas are employed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). We urge you to suspend all funding for UNRWA until all members of terrorist organizations are removed from its staff. We further urge you to use the United States’ leverage in the United Nations and UNRWA to ensure that its leader, Peter Hansen, is removed from office as soon as possible.

As you are likely aware, Peter Hansen, Commissioner General of UNRWA, has recently admitted, "I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don’t see that as a crime." It is absolutely unforgivable for a United Nations organization to employ terrorists.

In sharply worded report, former legal advisor to UN agency says group must redefine oxymoronic labeling of Palestinians with Jordanian, Lebanese citizenship as refugees

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees employs and provides benefits for terrorists and criminals, asserts a former legal adviser to UNRWA who left the organization in 2007. James Lindsay, now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, served as an attorney with the US Justice Department for two decades before leaving to work for UNRWA in 2000.

Titled 'Fixing UNRWA: Repairing the UN's Troubled System of Aid to Palestinian Refugees,' Lindsay's report puts forward suggestions intended to improve the agency. Established by the US and Britain after the 1948 war, UNRWA's objective was to aid displaced Palestinians.

Lindsay writes that although the US remains UNRWA's main contributor, the agency's positions contrast with Washington's.

During the recent fighting in Gaza a number of UNRWA institutions were bombed by the IDF, which claimed that terrorists had fired at forces from within or near the UN compounds. The agency's employees took a clear-cut stance against Israel during the war.

Lindsay's report warns that the agency has deteriorated increasingly over the years since its establishment, and that it was currently offering services to those who were not actually in need of them. "No justification exists for millions of dollars in humanitarian aid going to those who can afford to pay for UNRWA services," the report says.

He suggests UNRWA make operational changes and "halt its one-sided political statements and limit itself to comments on humanitarian issues; take additional steps to ensure the agency is not employing or providing benefits to terrorists and criminals; and allow the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), or some other neutral entity, to provide balanced and discrimination-free textbooks for UNRWA initiatives."

Lindsay concludes his report by saying that only these changes would allow the agency to complete its task in the Middle East. "For the Palestinians it serves, this means ending their refugee status and returning, after nearly sixty years, to what most of them so desperately seek: normal lives," he writes.

The report will be handed over to US President Barack Obama's administration, which is keen to help fix the ailing agency.

"The United States, despite funding nearly 75 percent of UNRWA’s initial budget and remaining its largest single country donor, has largely failed to make UNRWA reflect US foreign policy objectives. UNRWA initially served US humanitarian purposes, but in later years often clashed with US policies," the report says.

Lindsay claims the most important change that should be made in the agency is "the removal of citizens from recognized states – persons who have the oxymoronic status of “citizen refugees” – from UNRWA’s jurisdiction. This would apply to the vast majority of Palestinian “refugees” in Jordan, as well as to some in Lebanon and Syria."c

Al Arabiya reporter Hannan al-Masri is live on the air in Gaza when she is told that Hamas has just fired rockets from inside the Al Arabiya studio building, news which apparently strikes her as quite humorous.

More pro-Hamas videos are appearing on YouTube; this one was posted by VoiceOfJihaD and it shows very clearly how Hamas uses children as human shields. At about 1:20, the terrorists appear to be shooting at a helicopter overhead—and they send children into the streets, in the open, to point out where the helicopter is, while they stay hidden under trees and next to walls.

They do this because they know the IAF tries not to launch airstrikes against children. But they also know that if any of them are killed, their useful little spotters can easily be turned into propaganda tools with the willing assistance of Western media.

The media and the United Nations are screaming again today about an IDF attack on a UN compound; Ehud Olmert apparently apologized to the UN immediately after the incident, but now the IDF says Hamas was using the compound as a firing station.

Gunshots and an anti-tank missile were fired at IDF troops near the UN compound that was attacked by the IDF on Thursday, senior defense official told The Jerusalem Post.

Accordng to the officials, the IDF responded by firing artillery shells at the location of the gunmen and that the shells caused damage to the UN installations. At least three people were wounded and the building was set on fire.

The IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration coordinated the arrival of five fire trucks to the compound to help put out the flames.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in Israel Thursday to promote a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, expressed “strong protest and outrage” at the reported shelling of the UN compound.

Ban also demanded an investigation into the shelling, and said Defense Minister Ehud Barak had told him it was a “grave mistake.”

Palestinians reported that an IDF tank shell also struck one of the wings of a Gaza hospital midday Thursday. Witnesses said part of the structure was on fire. The army said that the building was also being used by Hamas men who were firing on IDF troops.

Israel says it does not target U.N. buildings or personnel. But the Israeli officer said troops opened fire after militants inside the compound shot anti-tank weapons and machine guns. He said the troops used 155 mm artillery shells.

Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, a radical Marxist who openly supports Hamas and the 9/11 hijackers, is seen once again in this CNN video about the death of a “freelance cameraman’s” brother in Gaza — and the footage in the hospital room was very likely staged for propaganda effect.

A closer view of the scene in the hospital room is here at CNN: Toll of conflict strikes home as cameraman finds brother dead - CNN.com.

LGF reader “Last Mohican,” a doctor, makes a strong case that this is an obvious fake.

I’m no military expert, but I am a doctor, and this video is bullsh-t. The chest compressions that were being performed at the beginning of this video were absolutely, positively fake. The large man in the white coat was NOT performing CPR on that child. He was just sort of tapping on the child’s sternum a little bit with his fingers. You can’t make blood flow like that. Furthermore, there’s no point in doing chest compressions if you’re not also ventilating the patient somehow. In this video, I can’t tell for sure if the patient has an endotracheal tube in place, but you can see that there is nobody bag-ventilating him (a bag is actually hanging by the head of the bed), and there is no ventilator attached to the patient. In a hospital, during a code on a ventilated patient, somebody would probably be bagging the patient during the chest compressions. And they also would have moved the bed away from the wall, so that somebody could get back there to intubate the patient and/or bag him. In short, the “resuscitation scene” at the beginning is fake, and it’s a pretty lame fake at that.

So the question is, were they re-enacting the resuscitation scene by repeating their actions on a corpse, because the child had died earlier? It’s likely that the answer is no, that child is still alive, and is just an actor pretending to be a child who was killed. Why do I say that? Because the big guy in the white coat, if he’s really a doctor, nurse, nurse’s aid, EMT, or any sort of health care provider at all would be entirely aware that tickling the boy’s sternum doesn’t really look like actual chest compressions. If the boy was dead, the man would have done a more convincing job in compressing the chest. The taps on the chest that he’s doing are the sort of thing you see in bad TV dramas, when you don’t want to make the poor actor playing the victim uncomfortable by really pushing on his chest. I think the man in the white coat knows this child is actually alive, and is making the simulated chest compressions gentle so as not to hurt the child. My guess is that he assumed the videographer, like those on better TV shows, would have been smart enough not to film as far down as the man’s hands on the chest.

UPDATE at 1/8/09 12:43:55 pm:

Well, well. CNN has removed the video from the page linked above, with no explanation or retraction.

UPDATE at 1/8/09 1:09:14 pm:

Here’s another version of the suspect footage at the UK’s Channel 4. (Whose coverage is horrifically biased against Israel.)

The scene in question starts at about 1:40.

<video>

And meanwhile, LGF reader “Killgore Trout” has discovered that the “freelance photographer,” Ashraf Mashharawi, also runs a business in Gaza called Nepras For Media & IT, which hosts websites. And according to Internet Haganah, in 2004 they were listed as the operator of at least two websites for ... Hamas.

Most of the mainstream media are ignoring the story, of course, because it leads to issues they’d rather not explore—e.g., the ethics of media’s almost universal practice of relying on Palestinian propagandists for their coverage from Gaza.

TIME Magazine’s Andrew Lee Butters brings up the staged video in this piece for their Middle East “Blog,” but it’s a cursory mention bordering on dismissal: Is Israel Losing the Media War in Gaza?

Israel’s decision to keep the Western press out of Gaza may also have backfired, because it’s given a monopoly of coverage to the more inflammatory reporting of Arab satellite television stations such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyya that maintain bureaus in Gaza. And while there are many excellent Palestinian journalists working for the Western press in Gaza, there have been some examples of doctored photographs and suspicious looking videos showing civilian suffering. Conservative blogs have singled out one video of doctors trying to resuscitate the brother of the CNN cameraman actually shooting the video, and suggested that it was really a re-enactment.

And so far, not a single mainstream source has mentioned the severe credibility problems of Norwegian terror-supporting doctor, Mads Gilbert.

Palestinian civilians have accused Hamas of forcing them to stay in homes from which gunmen shot at Israeli soldiers during the recent hostilities in Gaza, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Thursday.

More than 1,250 Palestinians were reportedly killed during Israel's offensive against Hamas in the coastal territory. Israel has been harshly criticized for the large number of civilians among the Palestinian dead, of whom they numbered more than half according Gaza officials.

But the Italian paper also quoted a doctor at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital as disputing the number of Palestinians said to have been killed in the campaign.

"It's possible that the death toll in Gaza was 500 or 600 at the most, mainly youths aged 17 to 23 who were enlisted by Hamas - who sent them to their deaths," he said.

13 Israelis were also killed during the 3-week operation, which was aimed at halting rocket fire on southern Israel and destroying Hamas' infrastructure.

The Gaza doctor was further quoted as saying: "Perhaps it is like Jenin in 2002. At the beginning they spoke about 1,500 dead, and at the end it turned out to be only 54 - of whom 45 were militants."

He was referring to the Israel Defense Forces battle with Palestinian militants in the West Bank town that took place during Operation Defensive Shield at the height of the second intifada.

Top IDF officer: Hamas made 'monstrous' use of children during Gaza op

The IDF Gaza Division Commander on Thursday, meanwhile, branded Hamas' use of women and children during the offensive in Gaza as "monstrous" and "inhumane."

Brig. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg said the civilians were sent by Hamas to transfer weapons to gunmen during the offensive. He also accused the Islamist militant group of booby-trapping many of the civilians' homes.

"Entire families in Gaza lived on top of a barrel of explosives for months without knowing," Eisenberg said.

The officer asserted that despite international calls for investigations into alleged war crimes, the Israel Defense Forces soldiers adhered to moral principles while fighting in Gaza.

Members of a Gaza family whose farm was turned into a "fortress" by Hamas fighters have reported that they were helpless to stop Hamas from using them as human shields.

They told the official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper that for years Hamas had used their property and homes as military installations from which the group would launch rockets into Israel, dig tunnels and store arms. According to the victims, those who tried to object were shot in the legs by Hamas operatives.

Palestinian Media Watch quoted the official Palestinian Authority daily, Al-Hayat al-Jadida as reporting on January 27, "The Abd Rabbo family kept quiet while Hamas fighters turned their farm in the Gaza strip into a fortress. Right now they are waiting for the aid promised by the [Hamas] movement after Israel bombed the farm and turned it into ruins."

According to the report, the hill on which the Abd Rabbo family lives overlooks Sderot, making it an ideal military position for Hamas fighters.

The Abd Rabbo family members emphasized to the paper that they were not Hamas activists and that they were still loyal to the Fatah movement, but that they had been unable to prevent the armed squads from entering their neighborhood at night.

Allegations that IDF soldiers deliberately shot and killed Palestinian civilians in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead have been found to be categorically untrue in official army investigations, an IDF source told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.

The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the results of the investigations have not yet been officially released to the public. He stressed, however, that the investigations were close to completion.

The investigations examined claims made by graduates of the Rabin Pre-military Academy during a conference held last month, which were later written up and printed in an academy pamphlet. Some Israeli media outlets, including Haaretz, then seized on the claims, and the allegations went on to make headlines around the world.

During the conference, one soldier claimed a marksman opened fire on a mother and two of her children, after a squadron commander told them to walk into a no-entry zone.

"All of the soldiers who were involved in the conference were questioned - not as a punishment - but in order to understand whether they had witnessed these things. From all of the testimonies we collected, we can safely conclude that the soldiers who made the claims did not witness the events they describe," the source said.

"All of it was based on rumors. In the incident of the alleged shooting of the mother and her children, what really happened was that a marksman fired a warning shot to let them know that they were entering a no-entry zone. The shot was not even fired in their general direction," the source said.

"The marksman's commander ran up the stairs of a Palestinian home, got up on the roof, and asked the marksman why he shot at the civilians. The marksman said he did not fire on the civilians. But the soldiers on the first floor of that house heard the commander's question being shouted. And from that point, the rumor began to spread," the source added.

"We can say with absolute certainty that the marksman did not fire on the woman and her children. Later, the company commander spoke with the marksman and his commander. We know with certainty that this incident never took place," he said.

The source said that a second allegation of killing of civilians was also false, though he could not provide further details at this stage.

"We investigate every allegation in order to see whether these incidents took place, and to draw conclusions if necessary," the source stressed.

"Unfortunately, due to competition, sections of the press picked up this story and ran with it. It is a shame the media promoted this sort of spin all over the world," he added. It is unlikely the damage to Israel's image from the allegations can be repaired, irrespective of the results of the investigation, he noted.

"It is a shame that the media allowed Palestinian manipulations to spread," he said.

"Look at the allegation that we killed 48 civilians in a UN school in Gaza. In reality, seven people were killed, and four to five of them were terrorists. The UN apologized, but the damage is done," the source said.

According to Palestinian report IDF soldiers shot a 15-year-old boy earlier this week in Gaza Strip, however it appears teen tried to cross over into Egypt via smuggling tunnelYnet

A Palestinian 15-year-old boy who was said to have been killed in the Gaza Strip this week returned to his home safe and sound, it was reported Saturday.

Palestinian medical elements initially reported that Mohammed al-Farmawi was killed by IDF fire near Rafah. According to the report, the teen approached the border fence near the Badhania airport and apparently tried to cross over into Israeli territory.

The IDF denied the report and said that dozens of Palestinians held protests in several locations near the border fence area in the Strip. During one such protest soldiers fired towards several protestors' legs after they refused to leave the site, but without causing casualties.

The teen returned home on Friday after apparently trying to cross over into Egypt via a smuggling tunnel, where he was kept for several days. The Ma'an news agency reported that his family was overwhelmed with happiness at the news.

Palestinian sources said that the boy's alleged death might have been related to

"internal affairs."

A source from the Palestinian Health Ministry said that they had received false reports from the field and had later declared that no body was found.

A few quotes from it - "There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria."- Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, a local Arab leader, to the Peel Commission, 1937

"Palestine was part of the Province of Syria... politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity."- The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted this in a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947

"It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."- Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council

"You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian People, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people."- Syrian President Hafez Assad to PLO leader Yassir Arafat.

"There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity.... yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."- Zuheir Muhsin, late Military Department head of the PLO and member of its Executive Council (Dutch daily Trouw, March 1977)

"Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees... while it is we who made them leave.... We brought disaster upon ... Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave.... We have rendered them dispossessed.... We have accustomed them to begging.... We have participated in lowering their moral and social level.... Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon ... men, women and children--all this in the service of political purposes...."- Khaled Al-Azm, Syria's Prime Minister after the 1948 war

"Palestine has never existed... as an autonomous entity. There is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture.... There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians.... Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc.... Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 percent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of one percent of the landmass. But that's too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today.... No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough."- from "Myths of the Middle East", Joseph Farah, Arab-American editor and journalist, WorldNetDaily.Com, 11 October 2000